1 82 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



alone requires 80,000 additional men and women for 

 hop-picking; whole villages in France and their cot- 

 tage industries are abandoned in the summer, and the 

 peasants wander to the more fertile parts of the 

 country; hundreds of thousands of human beings are 

 transported every summer to the prairies of Manitoba 

 and Dacota; and in Russia there is every year an 

 exodus of several millions of men who journey from 

 the north to the southern prairies for harvesting the 

 1 crops ; while many St Petersburg manufacturers re- 

 duce their production in the summer, because the 

 operatives return to their native villages for the culture 

 of their allotments. Agriculture cannot be carried on 

 without additional hands in the summer; but it still 

 more needs temporary aids for improving the soil, 

 for tenfolding its productive powers. Steam-digging, 

 drainage, and manuring would render the heavy clays 

 in the north-west of London a much richer soil than 

 that of the American prairies. To become fertile, those 

 clays want only plain, unskilled human labour, such 

 as is necessary for digging the soil, laying in drainage 

 tubes, pulverising phosphorites, and the like; and that 

 labour would be gladly done by the factory workers 

 if it were properly organised in a free community for 

 the benefit of the whole society. The soil claims that 

 aid, and it would have it under a proper organisation, 

 even if it were necessary to stop many mills in the 

 summer for that purpose. No doubt the present factory 

 owners would consider it ruinous if they had to stop 

 their mills for several months every year, because the 

 capital engaged in a factory is expected to pump money 

 every day and every hour, if possible. But that is the 

 capitalist's view of the matter, not the community's 

 view. As to the workers, who ought to be the real 

 managers of industries, they will find it healthy not 

 to perform the same monotonous work all the year 

 round, and they will abandon it for the summer, if 



